


like coming home

by grendelthegood



Category: Carnival Row (TV)
Genre: Gen, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-12 23:54:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20573018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grendelthegood/pseuds/grendelthegood
Summary: Philo as a boy, wanting to fly far far away. Vignette as a girl, wanting nothing more than to stay.Philo and Vignette as children, from the eyes of those closest to them.





	1. Darius, age 11

**Author's Note:**

> making a lot of stuff up. don't mind me.

I find Rycroft sitting on the sill of the window with his legs hanging out the wrong side of the building. A short hop beneath his feet is the slanted tiles of a roof, but one loose tile and he will tumble. One quick slip, and he will slip off into the air, into a long drop, into a crack and a crunch and a wet splatter.

“Daft,” is the first thing I say.

“Hello to you too, Darius.” Rycroft turns to me and smiles.

“I’m telling Headmaster Finch, Ryke.”

“Are you?”

“I’m telling.”

“Go on, then.” 

It’s the small hours of the night, and there is a chill, and the rain had only begun to let. All the other boys are asleep. No one stirs. No bed groans. I’ve caught Rycroft in the act only because I got up for the loo. 

When the sheer drapes wisp around him in the wind, the moonlight shimmers them into something like wings, pix wings.

I do not move. I say nothing. Rycroft puffs out air — laughs — and pushes off the sill to thump onto the roof below. Then he turns around and looks at me, waits for me, and I pull in breath because I know what it is he is waiting for, and the air burns. To my right, hanging high above, the Martyr creaks. Maybe He is watching. Tension tightens around my throat, like the tension of His noose.

“This is the third time, Ryke.”

“And third time’s the charm.”

“You’re going to break your neck.”

“Something’s definitely going to break, if you keep talking loud like that.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Yours.” Rycroft grins, turns on his heels, and walks away. The tiles beneath his feet clink and clank and shine with leftover rain. Idjit’s not even wearing shoes.

I turn too, but not to follow. I go to my bed. I stand by the bedside, but do not crawl in. I do not crawl in because I’m rolling and puffing up my blankets instead. If Headmaster Finch peeks in, it will at least look like a body is cocooned inside. I go to Rycroft’s bed and do the same. I punch his pillow, just because I can.

Then I go to the window. Then I climb out the window.

The tiles are cold. I grip them with my toes and patter after Rycroft far ahead of me. On and on we go, slanted roof after roof, over low brick walls and along stone ledges.

Around and below us, the city of Burgue sprawls. It sleeps. In the distance, dogs bark. In the distance, a lonely bell rings in the wind.

The moon is full and yellow tonight. The night is almost bright from it.

We stop, same as the first two times, on an old flat roof of vents and pipes and chimneys. Parts of the plaster have rotted through, so boards have been laid out to bridge the gaps. Through the holes beneath me, I can peer into the dark of the abandoned building to see boxes and crates and thick drapes of white, all caked in dust. Water drips and drips. 

Past the building, across an impossible jump, is the high rail tracks of the trolley-train.

Rycroft stands with his back to me, by the edge of the jump and the drop. His weight dips the board beneath him, but only a little. He’s always been lighter than all of us. 

Tucked into a nook by the wall is a worn pack, too small to fit even a pair of boots. It’s where Rycroft’s been squirreling away scraps of food and supplies for his eventual flight from the foundling home. 

“Same tired trick?”

“I’ll have you know I’m feeling real good about tonight.”

“Because wet ground is great for jumping.”

“I’ve been practicing.”

“Jumping on beds is not practicing.”

“I can jump farther than you.”

“You can jump farther than me and the others and Finch combined, and you still won’t make that jump.” I jut my chin at the gap between our building and the high rails. Two grown centaurs could stretch out between the space and their hooves would only graze the metal of the tracks. 

“Like I said, I’m feeling real good about tonight.”

“Right. Good for you. We’re heading back.” I step onto the board and take Rycroft’s arm. He shrugs out of my grip and does not look at me. His gaze holds only on the high rails. Moonlight glints off his eyes and shears over the metal of the rails. 

“We’re already here. Might as well try.”

“Try? You know there’s no do-overs from death, right.”

“The Martyr would beg to differ.”

“And this is not a game.”

Rycroft says nothing. He crouches, then stretches out his legs. The board sways. He straightens and bends enough to touch his toes.

Tension winds around my throat again. I fist my hands, then open them, then close them again. “Say you make it, then. You make the jump, and manage to — by some miracle — sneak unnoticed onto a trolley without a fare, and you take the ride out to the city’s edge. Then what? You think the farms are gonna hire a pix-boned kid like you?”

“Ad said they’ll take any able bodies.”

“Right, ‘cause falling and shattering all your bones would make you able-bodied.”

“That’s only if I fall.”

“When you fall.”

“Not gonna fall.” Rycroft straightens again. He stretches wide, and spreads his arms, and with breath full in his chest he says, “I feel like I could fly tonight.”

I watch him. I know something like a snarl is curling over my lips and wrinkling my nose. “There you go again,” I say.

“I’m serious this time.”

“I wish you would be, ‘cause this time? It’s not just gonna be a neat little cut on the back of your head from falling off the bed.”

“You didn’t have to come, you know.”

“Piss off,” I say, and wish I didn’t. Regret stings. I reach for Rycroft again and sink my grip into his arm. The board beneath us creaks. “We’re going home.”

Rycroft barks a laugh.

“Ryke.”

“Home,” he says, and laughs again. 

“Ryke. This is bollocks, and you know it.”

“Let me go.”

“No.”

“Unless you want to jump too.”

“No one is jumping. We’re going back, before Finch realizes we’re gone.”

“I dreamt tonight, you know?” 

I pause. On the rails, a trolley clatters by, echoed loud, all lights and steam. I tighten my grip and tug Rycroft away from the edge, but he tugs back against me, and turns to me, and in that passing moment of the trolley rolling by, Rycroft is halo’d by light. His eyes flash. I recall seeing a painting like him now, him in the dark on the heights, a painting of an angel with eyes of fire.

That same fire burns through me, enough that I yank him again.

“Enough, Rycroft. We’re going.”

“Yeah. I am. Now get off of me.” He shoves me. I fist my other hand in his shirt.

“If you wanna die that badly,” I spit, “then at least do it so people don’t hafta mop up your mess.”

“Get. Off.” He shoves again, and I slip, or maybe he slips. And then the board beneath us cracks.

We fall.

The fall is a bruise like a hammer’s blow, and wood shatters, and all is dark. Fire snaps along the bones of my wrist and the skin of my back, and the sound around us is like some ruin crumbling. My panting is loud. When the wood finally settles, it is all I can hear, my breaths in the dust. I wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark.

Rycroft is across from me. He’s broken through several crates. Splinters of wood have detonated around him, and his legs are propped up in strange angles from the fall, tangled up in drapes. Red stains those drapes. There’s a long, long cut on his nose that stretches over his cheek.

His gaze, glassy, is pinned on the star-studded sky above us.

I am stunned by the fall into silence, into staring. I can feel my blood soaking my shirt, hot against my skin.

Rycroft says, the way secrets are said, “I dreamt I was flying.”

I listen. He says, “I pushed off from the window and my wings took me up, and I could feel the tug of my own weight against my back, and it was a real pain in the head, because suddenly I was controlling six arms instead of two, or it was something like arms. And the wind was in my hair. And the wind was on my skin.”

I say nothing. I say not a word. Slowly, Rycroft closes his eyes. Slowly, he begins to laugh.

I don’t say much else for the rest of the night. I pull away from the bed of splintered wood and rise to my feet. I help Rycroft to his because he’d broken his ankle. The flesh there is swollen dark and purple. I sling his arm over my shoulders and tuck my own broken wrist against my chest, and the two of us hobble slowly, slowly, back to the orphanage. 

The sky is faded by the time we get back. At the gates, before we mount the steps, Rycroft says, “Don’t tell anyone,” and I know he doesn’t mean the running away, the stealing, the almost dying. He means the dreams.

“Too late for that.”

He tenses. So I say, “Everyone already knows you’re an idjit. No point in hiding it.”

And then he pauses. And then he laughs, like I knew he would. We hobble the rest of the way past the gates and up the steps, and when we face Headmaster Finch, we face him together.


	2. Tale Stonemoss, age 57

Vignette’s wings brighten for the first time the night of her twelfth birth day. Lights trace blue-green over the veins and scales, rippling, and I tell her it’s beautiful, that she’s beautiful. 

“But Mammi,” she asks. “Why are you crying?”

“Because you’re lovely, hummingbird,” I say. “Because I’m so very happy,” I lie.

She is just a girl. She cannot know. 

I dress her in our finest reindeer coat, the one with the embroidered collar, and redo her braids to weave in three red stones and a stone of yellow. It is to be her heart. She is of age now; it will be hers to give. When I am done, she traces her fingers down her braid and over her new stones, and she turns around and beams at me. Her smile is a cut of light, quick and easy and stunning.

I take her by the hand and kiss her cheek, and together, we fly to the hut of the Haruspex.

It is the same Haruspex I flew to when I first had my Brightening. She is the one that read the veins of my wings and sang to me my future. 

“Mammi,” Vignette asks. “What did the Haruspex say to you when you were of age?”

“I don’t quite remember,” I lie again. “It was a spell ago.”

“It wasn’t. Mammi’s still young,” Vignette says.

“Is that so?” I smile.

“It is so.” She nods and grins and squeezes my hand. I laugh and touch her cheek.

“She told me I would marry late,” I say. “She told me I would only have one child.”

“That’s it?”

“Readings are often quite short. Even the impressive ones.”

“I wonder why,” she hums.

“It’s a kindness, I think.”

Vignette turns to me and looks at me, and I know she is asking for me to continue. Her silence is full of question. But she is only a girl. She cannot know. I smile and touch her cheek again and say, only, “The less us normal fae-folk know, the less we’ll have to worry about.”

It is not enough. Vignette is not appeased; the furrow between her brows has not smoothed out. So I ask, to distract her, “Is there a particular reading you want, darling bird? A calling? A destiny? A beau?”

Vignette curls a finger around her braid and thinks, and thinks. “Yes,” she says, eventually. She lifts my hand to her cheek. Her smile, so bright, makes me want to cry.

“To stay,” she says. “To stay always with Mammi, and Dah. To stay on the farms and grow old with the fields.”

“You’d grow old and bored.”

“Never,” Vignette promises. “Coming home would never be a bore.”

I can say nothing, nothing at all.

When we arrive, the Haruspex is already waiting. She smiles. Her eyes do not.

Her hut is small, and dark, and its air stings of spices. It has not changed in these many, many moons. Inside, underneath the strung together bones of bears and beaks of crows, Vignette kneels on a mat with her wings unfurled. The Haruspex’s fingers are long and tipped and stained coal-black, and she brushes those stained tips along the veins of Vignette’s wings, down one path, then the other, and the other. Her eyes roll white. The hut is silent.

Then with a voice like smoke, like incense, she sings:

_Steward of secrets_  
_Keeper of woe_  
_Lost, then found_  
_in the arms of your foe_

_Steward of nothing_  
_Keeper, now lost_  
_fight to fly_  
_no matter the cost_

Vignette does not understand, of course. I don’t either. Not truly. She asks the Haruspex after, what the reading means, and the Haruspex only smiles and asks Vignette what _she_ thinks. 

“A steward,” Vignette ventures, “at a Mimasery?”

“You would certainly be guarding secrets.”

Vignette beams. Her wings flutter on joy. She turns to me, and I nod and smile, and I tell her to wait outside the hut while I carry out my own reading with the Haruspex. 

It is a lie. My smile is a lie. I am getting no reading.

I am only trying to hide, to run, to cry in the dark where she cannot see.

When the Haruspex and I are alone, she makes me a brew. It smells of rabbit meat and mint. It is meant to calm.

“She does not know,” the woman says.

“She is only a girl,” I say.

“Girls grow up.”

“I suppose they do.” That girls grow up, I know. But I will never see my girl grow up. 

I remember my song, that I am to wed late, and that I am to die early. When my baby hummingbird becomes of age and flies the nest, my husband and I will perish. Fire, the Haruspex had said. We will be ash to ash and dust to dust, and there is no cheating death. 

The woman comes to my side and presses a small bowl into my hands. It is warm, soothing. The aroma calms. 

“You’ve raised her well,” she says.

“I tried.”

“She is meant for greatness,” she says.

“I see.”

I am shaking, I realize. I am cold. I bring the bowl to my lips and drink deeply. 

The Haruspex touches my back. “She will grieve, for a time. But she will not be alone. She will never truly be alone.”

“Will she be happy?”

“Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no.”

“Will she be content?”

“Content?”

“’To stay,’ she said.” I am shaking again. “To have a home and those like home, and to stay. That is what she wanted most. Will she attain it? Will she be content?”

“Not for a long while,” the Haruspex says. “She will be lost, and torn asunder, and she will have no home.” 

Then, of all things, the woman smiles. This time, this time, the smile touches her eyes. It deepens her crow’s feet. It brightens her air. She folds her hands over mine, and it is a comfort to find that they are warm. Her touch is gentle, gentle enough that I bow my head and weep, and weep.

“But then,” she promises, “she will be found.”

“But then,” she promises, “she will be mended. Home will be lost to her, and there will be no staying for her. But she will find a new path, a new way, and it will be like coming home. It will be like coming home.”


End file.
